I’m a happy chappy today. I’ve just got “Dirt Cheap Melody”, the new single from The Trudy.

I last wrote about The Trudy in 1989. Which is slightly strange because that was 23 years ago and I’m only 27 now. It’s the truth, I tell you. The group went missing for more than a decade, but resurfaced in 2006. They’re busy people – singer Melissa Jo Heathcote has recorded with the Easy Access Orchestra and Just Jack and is also a member of The Pukes, the all-female ukulele punk outfit, while guitarist Paul Crook has a parallel career as a dancer and is the reigning UK Lindy Hop Champion (I kid you not) – but I’m pleased they still have time for a little bit of Trudyosity. Last month, for instance, they played at a benefit gig in London for Cardiacs main man Tim Smith, who suffered a paralysing stroke in 2008. Peter Tagg, The Trudy’s founder and drummer, was in the original line-up of Cardiacs.

Back in 1989, I described Ms Heathcote as “bubbling constantly, like a coffee pot left on the stove” and I called her hair “a virtual froth”. Which wasn’t very kind of me. She is certainly still a lively beggar, but there’s something quite delicate about her voice on “Dirt Cheap Melody”, a song about youthful dreams turning into kitchen sink dramas. It’s about earworms too – kind of like a new slant on the opening lines of Helen Reddy’s “Angie Baby” (“You live your life by the songs you hear on the rock ‘n’ roll radio”) – and that’s more than a little fitting. “Dirt Cheap Melody” is bold and bright and breezy pop music with the lid blown off and a fat rainbow bursting out. If it doesn’t stick in your head, you’ll need to get yourself to a hospital and ask them to check your skull for holes. You’ve probably got a leak somewhere.

You can buy “Dirt Cheap Melody” from the Genepool download website, where it has been topping the best sellers list for the last two weeks. Click here for The Trudy’s Genepool page.